We recently spoke about some of the key challenges businesses are facing in developing and evolving their social customer service. At a recent Social Media Forum with UKCCF, delegates took part in interactive workshop discussions, debating and sharing best practice hints.

In our previous post about the seminar we discussed how taking a strategic approach to social customer service can help achieve operational efficiency. In this post we take a look at the thoughts and ideas from our second workshop session.How to take a proactive approach to social

The group discussed the importance of taking a proactive stance towards social customer care. It matters because it improves customer loyalty and shows your customers you care. It can also provide valuable customer insights you might not get by just waiting for customers to tell you about problems.

Here are five ways that you can show customers that you care and are committed to resolving their issues and problems to deliver a better experience.

5 ways to become more proactive with social customer care

#1. Proactive publishing

Notify customers in advance of any issues that impact upon service delivery or their brand experience such as service outages, website maintenance or issues with courier deliveries.

Link this to self-service and self-help content to help reduce contact centre contacts and help customers find the information they need

Be the conscience of the customer. Try to put yourself in their shoes and look for ways to calm and clarify the situation and show the customer you are on top of any issues.

Engage with the positive. Not all messages are complaints. When customers receive great service they will often share this on social. Use this to build customer relationships and show the friendly side of your brand.

#2. Create a crisis management plan

Plan out a clear policy or set of guidelines for your social team to use in the event of a social crisis. This will help ensure you stay on the front foot as much as possible and shows customers you are managing the situation effectively.

Be clear on crisis triggers, so a situation can be escalated to the right level quickly and managed effectively to reduce impact

Ensure your plan covers out of hours coverage in case a crisis breaks outside of normal working hours. Use your social customer service tool to set up automated, rules-based alerts around upticks in volume, influencer and channel activity or negative sentiment.

#3. Use intelligent automations to lighten the load

Auto-tag messages where relevant to help reduce manual work and lighten the administration workload on agents. This helps free up their time for meaningful engagement with customers

Help your team manage and triage any sudden volume spikes or improve response times across your social channels.

#4. Seek stakeholder engagement and support

Show how routing complaints to social can reduce the pain for other teams

Demonstrate how social can save money and reduce the cost to serve

Align your social strategy with organisational business objectives to ensure you can show how social is contributing to the company vision

Use social data to help you understand more about the customer lifecycle and their needs. This can be fed back into the business to try and resolve issues before they happen, or improve self-service options.

Tags complaints in your social customer service tool, to help segment the types of complaints you are receiving and make it easier to report on them. Ensure they are meaningful for the type of analysis you want to perform.

Use hard data to justify any requests for additional resources with clear statistics to illustrate your point and show the benefit it will bring.

Used with permission from Sentiment. Original source: http://blog.sentimentmetrics.com/blog/5-ways-to-be-more-proactive-with-social-customer-care?utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=58987818&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-89Scbb7Zo4xWHJkkTGyUNBT0xBv-2s-5frt-CwTmVkXIyCgbRJbbqTOZAerdgZucB280MCMub_CAZbkMEy9uzBPPZMGA&_hsmi=58987818

Anita has over 15 years’ experience in B2B marketing, digital marketing and communications. With extensive experience in Saas and technology marketing she supports businesses in growing their customer base and improving customer retention.